The Last of Us 2 has become a minefield for the press, developers and fans.

By all accounts, The last of us part 2 It’s a resounding success: The survival horror game has a 94 on the Metacritic review score ranking site and has already sold millions of copies. Sony called it “the best-selling first-party PS4 exclusive of all time,” which would be cause for celebration … except for the fact that simply discussing the game has become, large sections of the gaming community. video games, in toxic. It is exhausting.

The bad time was established before launch, when part of the game leaked online. Sony, the publisher of the game, said it had identified the people responsible, but not before some of the game’s biggest twists were released. Annoyed at some of the story beats revealed in the game’s LGBTQ filtering and rendering, some bigoted reactionaries began a campaign to spoil other people’s experience.

“It was one of the worst days of my life when the leak occurred,” Neil Druckmann, co-director of The last of us part 2he said in a YouTube video.

“A few hours later, [the leak is] everywhere and you start to be hated on all the social media you’re on, and soon that turns into death threats, anti-semitic comments and insanity that you could never have anticipated, “he continued, stating that he never thought game would get this kind of Hate. It’s still visible on social media, where top responses to just about anything from Naughty Dog will include responses like “The game is crap.” It seems unlikely that these opinions come from people who have actually played the game, given that it is impossible to explain how The last of us part 2 It could have accumulated hundreds of negative user comments on Metacritic immediately after launch.

Image: Naughty Dog / Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

Discussion of the survival horror game was also hampered by unusually restrictive embargo guidelines, which included sentences such as “DO NOT include any beat-by-beat description of fundamental narrative or scene moments” and “DO NOT reveal the fate of ANY character or event incitement. ” This prevented the websites from discussing any details of the game’s history, which was complicated considering that the game reveals something surprising in its first two hours that affects the rest of its 20-30 hour journey. Interestingly, at least one website, GameSpot, actually posted two comments, one without spoilers and one that dipped into those details. The latter was published after the embargo was completely lifted.

Why go through so many stretches, especially when the Internet was flooded with half-informed shots and speculation based on what had already leaked? Control. Naughty Dog no longer directed the narrative of The last of us part 2, and this was a way of trying to regain control. The studio had already gone to great lengths to keep tight control over what people knew about the experience. As Kotaku reported, Naughty Dog at one point showed a bogus scene during a trailer for people to believe that a character would be more present in the game than he actually was.

The atmosphere around the game hasn’t improved much since then. On June 12, Vice released his review of The last of us part 2, in which critic Rob Zacny said that while the game had “memorable moments” that made for a great “show,” he was less interested in the story and the characters. “No one reconsiders their quest for revenge,” Zacny wrote. “They all act under a kind of vengeful compulsion that is little discussed and unexamined.” Zacny went on to describe the game’s message as complacent, filled with “oppressive desolation and violence.”

While the vast majority of criticism has lavished The last of us part 2 With all sorts of praise, a handful of outlets, including the Polygon, have been a little more critical of the highly successful game. According to Zacny, Vice’s review led a Sony representative to contact Naughty Dog.

“They found that some of the conclusions that I reached in my review were unfair and ruled out some significant changes or improvements,” Zacny told Polygon in the Twitter messages.

Naughty Dog / Sony Interactive Entertainment

Zacny clarified that the exchange was not “confrontational,” but that it was nonetheless “unusual,” since the site does not usually have large publishers who officially ask why a review reads the way it does. Such things can It happens, of course, although often with smaller developers, or from publishers who have detected a factual error in a part they want to correct.

“However, I was happy to unpack some of my reasoning and received a perfectly cordial message in response,” Zacny said. Naughty Dog’s public relations team declined to comment on Polygon’s investigation of his exchange with Vice.

On social media, the responses of The last of us part 2The creative team has become a little more personal and public. Co-director Neil Druckmann has been arguing about the game to point out reporters mocking a tacky post he had compared The last of us part 2 to Schindler’s List. Other developers, like God of WarCory Barlog, of closed ranks around Druckmann, went so far as to unfairly position dissenting opinion as an attempt to take down developers.

Perhaps a defensive attitude was inevitable. When the Naughty Dog leak first appeared, many game makers turned to social media to express their disappointment that the gaming media reported on it. Rather than seeing those reports as part of the job, it’s news when one of the year’s biggest games leaks months before launch, news writers positioned themselves as traitors who weren’t “on the side” of the developers. . Now that the game is really out, that tension between the people involved with the game and the members of the press has only become more noticeable.

In late June, reporter (and my former colleague) Jason Schreier tweeted an innocuous and rather broad shot about the length of AAA games, an issue that is often a matter of debate. No specific game was mentioned in the original post, although Schreier did mention The last of us part 2 as inspiration in a threaded response. The tweet went viral.

In response, Troy Baker, the voice actor behind Joel, one of the main characters in The Last of Us. Games: He quoted Schreier’s tweet along with a bizarre quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the value of a critic versus that of a creator. “It is not the critic who counts,” begins the quote. “The credit belongs to the man who is really in the sand, whose face is stained with dust and sweat.” Hundreds of people confronted Schreier for daring to say something.

Schreier had already clarified that although The last of us part 2 It had been the game that inspired his tweet, his core message was neither specific nor limited to the Naughty Dog game.

“The games are too long because marketers believe they will only sell billions of copies and generate billions of revenue for shareholders if they can put ‘the world’s greatest’ in the box,” he said, in response to another. tweet about it. Schreier’s impromptu review spoke about some obscure truths about the general state of the video game industry. He was referring to the urge to make bigger video games as a means to justify the cost of $ 60, and how that increases the length of the game. Worse yet, that endless content drive can also lead to crisis and burnout of people who have to fill these worlds with endless things to do, including game developers on Naughty Dog, according to Schreier’s own reports.

Still, Schreier clarified that his tweet was primarily a joke. “Any shot that declares something definitive about ‘video games’ should not be taken seriously enough to warrant a 400-word Theodore Roosevelt quote,” he told another Twitter user.

That protective shield around The last of us part 2 It can be seen anytime creatives or behind-the-scenes talent jump into critical conversations about it. He made himself talk about the exhausting game. For one thing, we have fans who go out of their way to bring down the game by its inclusion of strange characters. On the other hand, we have the people who really made the game by raising their figurative fists. On the other hand (go with him), we have professional fans and critics trying to share their own opinions about the game, good and bad and everything in between.

Image: Naughty Dog / Sony Interactive Entertainment

And then there is the game itself, which due to its tense genre and heavy theme, is also burdensome to advance. The last of us part 2 It would be difficult to play in any context, but it feels particularly oppressive right now, during a real pandemic where we are all doing our best not to lose our minds. You can hardly blame the Naughty Dog creative team for being too connected to all of this. They care about their baby, yes, but more importantly, there is little else to do right now. The last of us part 2 It was, at one point, positioned as the PlayStation 4 Swan Song, a great heavy hitter from Sony’s most esteemed studio, to be released before the next generation of video games. Instead, The last of us part 2 it leaked before launch and exploded in controversy.

If we are really taking the game seriously, nuanced and critical conversations are not only necessary: ​​they must happen without fear of being perceived as a bully or enemy. Not all Naughty Dog conversations fall into that trap, of course. I appreciated seeing a Naughty Dog employee say that there are a lot of LGBTQ members on the team and that ignoring them threatens to delete them. And I also loved seeing some workers talk about the extraordinary thinking put into everything, like the act of breaking glass.

But, based on my own conversations with other critics, many have taken a cautious air about The last of us part 2 speech. It seems there are all of these bigger forces working to maintain the status quo when it comes to big budget games. It is not enough that the game sells well and that most of the reviews are positive; You can’t deviate from that general consensus, even as a joke, without having to worry about whether an editor will look over your shoulder at you or whether hundreds of fans will exploit your social media. It is not a conducive environment to encourage honest reviews or critical discussions, which ultimately hurts the game itself.